complicated. we've had general purpose machines for a long time. we always understood that those machines were general purpose and there was no way to stop them from being used in bad things. like, no one ever said every car has got four wheels on it and including the cars that bank robbers drive away from bank heists let's make a bank robber proof wheel. we understand that such an adventure would be doomed from the start and to attempt it would be substantial violence to wheels that we all rely on everyday. if you said the car, we can see that people who talk on phones, even hands free phones in cars gets into accidents and so i want a rule that says you're not allowed to put a hands free phone in a car, no one would say you're not allowed to have

a car -- telling people they're not allowed to have a car with a phone in it would break the idea of carness so we had this idea of if a thing is complicated that you can add and remove features from it, but a computer sits at this weird nexus of being complicated. the intuition that people have about computers is that we can solve a problem with a computer by removing some of its general purpose. we think of a computer that has excel running on it, the spreadsheet feature and we can remove the spreadsheet by telling people they're not allowed to run excel on their computers. but design a computer that can run every program except the one you don't like is impossible and the only way we can approach is by installing spy ware on your computer. if you want to make a computer that allows you and i to have secrets that we can use for

example to authenticate to our implanted defibrillators or to make sure our thermostats are set correctly or to ensure that our phones are calling the people we want to phone without leaking our phone conversations to third-parties or the cameras in our laptops aren't watching us while we undress for the evening. we need those secrets without having bad guys to have secrets is a fools errand. it's like making a wheel that's bad guy proof. computers are part of everything we do today and soon will be required for everything we do today. that's the trajectory of computers so every problem is going to involve computers. just, like, clothes are part of everything we do so everything involves clothes, but it would be -- if you could figure out how to make pants that fell down if you wore them while committing a bank robbery, you

would stop some bank robberies, but no one's ever proposed that in seriousness because we understand that pants can't be regulated that way. >> marcus in the book, he discovers a moment when his laptop was tapped. said the world had changed /tprefr. d forever. have you had one of those moments? >> not personally. as far as i can tell, i have not had a computer betray me in that way. i've had the fear of it happening. certainly i've gotten infected in viruss but it was in the old days when all they did was delete your files. today we live in the area of the rat, the remote access /troe trojan. last week the fbi arrested this creep who tricked miss teen usa

as a widespread practice today and it's not just practice by weird internet per vets. perverts. the german government got caught ratting computers of the state's trojan on the state's computer and it turned out this rat was not only things that allowed people to watch people to watch people through cameras, but other people could also go monitor the network for other people who were hanging out there who had been infected by the government. and if you found someone you could sort of worm your way into their computer and thereafter also look through their camera, listen to their microphone, capture their screens and so on. you know, we've seen school

administrators caught doing this to their students. a lot of schools hand out laptops to their students and they put laptop recovery software on their computers, which is a rat, and they use that to spy on their computers. there was a school in pennsylvania that photographed a student more than 6,000 times. they thought he was a bad student and in the company of his minor siblings and so on. and then just last year the federal trade commission settled with seven companies that did rent to own laptops and an eighth company decyber ware that provided a rat to those companies and they stipulated in their settlement with the ftc they admitted they'd been secretly recording their customers having sex, recorded their conversations,

intercepted their log ins for doctor's websites, medical and legal information, plundered their hard files for interesting files to pass around the office and they did all this stuff and the ftc didn't fine them and said you're no longer allowed to do this unless you put it in the fine print. unless in the user agreement that said by renting this laptop you agree we're allow today watch you. by using skype you agree that any time you use the word democracy we'll send a copy of your im the proliferation of this now has given me the fear like when my computer behaves erratically i think i have a rat.

you mentioned and enjoy doing it. was this meant to be a how to guide for -- >> it was meant to be a how to guide for figuring out how to take liberty of your computer. forbidden knowledge was something we trafficked in. someone in my peer group met someone who met someone who knew if you unscrewed on the back you get a dial tone you could make a free phone call and that information spread like wild fire. it was part of our social capital in our group and that was pretty amazing in those days, but these days the forbidden knowledge is pretty easy to lay hands on. the price of a fact has crashed to zero, but knowing which facts to finds has become more

expensive than ever because all the facts are at your fingertips. by having a book that was affectively a bunch of key words you could type into your favorite search engine and scenarios that would describe what you might find on the other end of those search queries, i thought i'd provide concepts that people could use to seize the means of information themselves to figure out how to make their computers dance to their own tune. >> in reading your book, and i think all the people you hang out with and stuff that you read on a daily basis you proply got some good tips for the audience on what they can do to help protect their privacy. it all seems a little daunting

now, especially be snowden. >> i toured the secret to homeland in february and the first stop of the tour was seattle public library, that awesome crazy building in seattle and i gave this talk about rats and trojans and at the end of it this woman put her hand up and you said you scared the pants off me. i don't know what to do. i don't know how to secure all my devices. and i said i don't know how to secure all my devices either. i'm a former systems administrator, and i can barely configure a wi-fi these days. i don't know how to secure all my systems, and even if i did, i live in a world where other people are in charge of my systems too so if fact that i can make it sufficient. you can run free operating

systems, you can replace the operating system that comes on your phone with a more secure one. i like signage and mod which is a replacement for android. everything is great about it for its name. it gives you a bunch of features that google doesn't give you out of the box and it's fully open so if there are any back doors they are likely to come to light faster than in the android system. you have wicker, your secure messaging protocol, which is very good as well. but if i came to you and said our water treatment project is not up to snuff you would not say my goodness, how do i operate my own water filtration facility and master

microbiology in order to make sure the water i drink is safe. you would make sure how do i make sure that the country that i live in thinks about water with sufficient gravitas and takes it seriously enough that they make sure the water is safe. we have laws in the books like the digital millennium copy right act that says it 's illegal to discuss venerabilities in computers if in so doing you'll make it easier to pirate movies and music, and what that means is if you discover something that makes the owner venerable and revealing that problem might make it easier to save a movie to a hard drive after it's been streamed to you, you have to think twice about it. that's a bad idea. major security venerabilities have been delayed in coming to light because the researchers

were afraid. one case sony ended up infecting an estimating 300,000 military networks before it was disclosed /pwa*euz d because the people who discovered it were afraid they'd be busted by the dmca. we have governments now including the government trafficking in venerabilities the computers. we talked about your daughter's discovery and she disclosed it to apple. you say to apple, we're telling you about this venerability, you have so many days to fix it and after that period we're telling everyone about it and that way they're incentivized to fix it, we've done it for years. now government is interested in buying venerabilities. instead of having these disclosed so they can be fixed, governments have set up markets

places where they buy these venerabilities in order to make these tom clancy style cyber weapons that they think they can use to fight these weird spook on spook world powers. instead of them being disclosed, the most lucrative thing to do with a venerability is to sell it to a government that weaponizes it, you may fall /aeu a fell to and use it to attack you. again, if government's discovered problems with the water supply we would expect them to fix the water supply, not figure out how to use that to give tummy aches to all the bad guys. we understand we all drink from the same water supply, there is only one internet and we are all connected to it and

undermining its security is a bad idea. figure out how to make your computer better, but figure out how to make your country better. the aclu, all the groups that have worked on this stuff fight for the future, demand progress, all the groups that have worked on keeping the internet open and free. public knowledge. the list is so long. i list them all in the back of little brother and homeland. it's actually quite heartening because when i started looking at this stuff that list was quite short, but now there's this whole alphabet soup of organizations that really care about this stuff and are attacking the problem from every angle, including librarians. yes, join eff, get involved with creative comments, get involved with the creative

software foundation. if you go to school, do all of these things that put pressure on your government and pressure on regulators to make computers more secure and to make them enhance freedom instead of taking them away because we can't all individually of solve these problems. we have to solve as a society. >> i agree completely. >> thank you. >> i have one last question and we're going to open it up to the audience. we have about another 30 minutes so everybody out there start thinking about what you want to ask corey. >> i'll remind you that a long rambling statement followed by what do you think of that is not a good question. >> what optimistic things do you see in the future here about technology and where to bring us in society? >> i often get asked if i'm an

op to op to optimist or pessimist and i think i'm both. i am an optimist because i feel like we can take those steps, but one of our best weapons for keeping the internet free is the internet. it helps us organize ourselves and take collective action in ways that previous generations could only dream of. when i was an activist in the 80's 90 percent of my time was stuffing envelopes. this is an amazing thing and i am incredibly optimistic that computers will lower the cost of working together and as that cost getses lower, our ability as a loosely constituted public

to hold these establishments to account will get more and more powerful. people sometimes ask me, like, how would you write science fiction about the future? how do you predict things about the future. in general, if you want to predict futuristic things that feel credible, i think what you should do is imagine that anything that today requires a big group like a corporation or government or army and imagine it being done by a group of people who are about knit together as a bake sale. i think that feels futuristic. we have built things as complicated as skyscrapers using these open methodologies and that trend will continue so what would an optimistically conceived space program that was made out of mail lists and

wiki's look like? that to me is the optimistic future. >> i'm glad there is one. >> questions? >> i'm not in charge of hands so don't look at me when you -- there's mic runners over there. >> i thought you were a local of san francisco when you wrote this. what research did you do about san francisco to get the knowledge? >> i lived here for six years before moving overseas so that was my research. i commuted here for years. i used to work for a high-tech firm down in silicone valley. i remember the google campus when it was the sdi campus. i have been coming here since the mid '90's and lived here from the late '90's.

light speed system content filtering. we were censored by a company that said that any website that had any nudity at all, even one picture of michael angelo's david. then we found that the sex offender registry for, like, public urination, but that's not he was on it for. he was on there for sexually interfering with a 14-year-old girl. he was really into posting long detailed accounts of his sex play parties on the internet. we're like, we know you love love the first amendment, we just wish you'd share. by all means, let your freak flag fly, but stop getting in the way of everyone else's.

>> i was wondering, our systems are built into stuff like the operating system as good as systems like true crips and do you think they will be in the future for encrypting your data. >> should you use lux or true crypt? i think in general they are both subject to an immense amount of pure scrutiny, which is the best way to find flaws, and there will be flaws in a security system. both of those systems are subject to a lot of peer

scrutiny and i think both of them are good robust systems. lux is the basis is pretty good. >> i had a few questions, so i decided to go with one that was more real van relevant today. i was just curious as to, you know, how to post around how these are all these blunders about having his information out there that gave insight to who he was ahead of his arrest. if you could talk about things about, like, maybe the kind of -- like, how people can help make sure that things like that -- what is your views on, like, the silk road was one of my questions, but then i thought i don't know if that's relevant to your book. >> i think there are a lot of

lessons to learn from the silk road shut down because of operator error. the first is that you can do policing without having to sabotage crypto because criminals make mistakes. the way they caught the guys who tried to blow up the twin towers the first time around was through good old fashioned policing and they went and found them, not by listening in on everybody's phone calls. terrorists are not 100 foot tall super genius giants. they are foolish and deluded people who are in many cases suicidal and not thinking very clearly and they make a lot of mistakes. in england we had these three guys who blew themselves up because they thought they could blow an airport up by filling their trunk with pro pain

propane and ramming their car into the airport. it did nothing but kill them. crooks make mistakes, cops don't need to spy on everybody to catch the bad guys. the other lesson of that is that the technological security we can get is insufficient enough to make us secure. imagine you were trying to use crypto to make yourself as secure as possible in a state who were technology itself as the bull work of staying free? and i think the answer is no. i think that eventually someone will make a mistake because again, like that kind of hypervigilant, that perfect

vigilance, never making any mistakes, is not an achievable goal. our goal should be a tolerant state. has a prison system that's operated humanely because when the judicial system puts them to jail incorrectly we don't want them to go in a california pen was cruel and unusual punishment because they were so overcrowded. that's the real security system. the real security system is a free and fair state and the layer we build on top of it, the freedom layer is just the first line of defense, but we need defense in depth and that comes out of having a fair

society. >> i think we have time for one more question. >> it better be awesome. no pressure. >> i think it's a good one to end with. you've talked a lot and i've heard other people talk about the constitutionality or the constitution as a backbone for a lot of what's going on. do you see the constitution as it stands as sufficient to take us forward when the world we're going into is so very different from anything that could have possibly been envisioned at the beginning? >> i think the constitution is designed to fail moderately well. it's been amended and reamended many times through its history. i think that the great barrier we face is one that the framers foresaw which is corruption. larry has written a lot recently about what the framers meant by corruption and the idea that congress being beholden to funders is a major

source of corruption. i think the problem economists are discussed for a long time is really a problem of the fact that people who benefit from corruption tend to have very concentrated interested. if i pollute the water by not treating my industrial waste, that goes into my pocket and i can make sure i don't get fined for that. it's hard for the people who get hurt by the water and it's hard for them to come together and lobby as hard and i'm lobbying to make water dirty. one of the things we've seen from the rise of crowd funding or kick starter is it's incredibly possible to and maybe address some of that. i've got a column coming out where i talk about a thought

experiment for solving ing patent troll where people pledge publically say i will pay to fight the patent troll if 100 other people agree to do it with me. one year you don't pay the bandits. you have that collective action problem where if a few people decide to pay off the bandits they don't burn those peoples fields and meanwhile they can't pay enough to pay the mercenaries. if you could build something like a kick starters, sudden will the corruption doesn't become irrelevant, but there's a stronger check against it that we've ever had before. there's this able to fight back by con concentrating the impact of the victims of corruption.

>> thanks corey. >> thank you so much corey. thank you ladies and gentlemen ladies and gentlemen for a wonderful evening. let's give him one more great round of applause. thank you, good evening. [music] >> we are approving as many parks as we can, you have a

value garden and not too many can claim that and you have an historic building that has been redone in a beautiful fashion and you have that beautiful outdoor ping-pong table and you have got the art commission involved and if you look at them, and we can particularly the gate as you came in, and that is extraordinary. and so these tiles, i am going to recommend that every park come and look at this park, because i think that the way that you have acknowledged donor iss really first class. >> it is nice to come and play and we have been driving by for literally a year. >> it is kind of nice. >> all of the people that are

here. ♪ >> we've never been in so much focus worldwide and will not be this this is a the moment in time when a story going and make a wish is a program that fulfills wishes for children we operate in every cities there are 62 chapters. our chapter was formed in 8984 we fulfilled 24 wishes. our chapter covers from movntd ray 17 communities and